Newton says such open source competitors can scale their development much faster than any closed-source competitor. “We’re not trying to hide things until they’re ready. We’re constantly putting out new functionality, and people are doing stuff with it.” By combining a number of projects together, something open source companies themselves are increasingly doing, all the work that Oracle and its acquisitions have done over a decade can be replicated in a fraction of the time.

Enterprise open source is moving up the stack into applications and up the stack in terms of customer size. The “natural” profit gain you assume in a consolidating industry just isn’t being earned. Competition is collapsing in the closed source world, but it is just beginning in the open source world.